the colder lands on their own latitude, or further north, were too sparsely populated and had too few goods to exchange to make trade with them worthwhile. England needed new outlets and northwest seemed best. This dilemma Richard Hakluyt spelt out in the opening paragraphs of his account of the Willoughby and Chancellor voyage, which set out in 1553 to seek out a northeast passage ‘to new and unknown kingdoms’ in which he stated:
At what time our merchants perceived the commodities and wares of England to be in small request with the countries and people about us, and near to us, and that those merchandises were now neglected, and the price thereof abated, certain grave citizens of London, and men careful for the good of their country, began to think with themselves, how this mischief might be remedied.
Seeing that the wealth of the Spaniards and Portuguese, by the discovery and search of new trades and countries was marvellously increased, supposing the same to be a course and mean for them also to obtain the like, they thereupon resolved upon a new and strange navigation. After much speech and conference together, it was at last concluded that three ships should be prepared and furnished out, for the search and discovery of the northern part of the world . . .
Yet trade, as it was promoted by Hakluyt, meant dealing directly with Cathay, so finding a route to this eastern market became an imperative, to the detriment of focusing on new world settlement. Or did it? There were some propagandists such as the Reverend Daniel Price, quoted earlier, who preached that America was its own cornucopia, equalling:
Tyrus for colours, Basan for wood, Persia for oils, Arabia for spices, Spain for silks, Narcis for shipping, Netherlands for fish, Pomona for fruit, and by tillage, Babylon for corn, besides the abundance of mulberries, minerals, rubies, pearls, gems, grapes, deer, fowls, drugs for physic, herbs for food, roots for colours, ashes for soap, timber for building, pastures for feeding, rivers for fishing, and whatsoever commodity England wanted.
Why venture further? The propagandists, dreamers and schemers listened, believed and continued to invest to send others out to lose their ships and their lives trying to bypass America through the adamantine barrier of ice.
LAND RIGHTS
If the merchants and investors could be won over by suggestions of increased trade, potential settlers needed to be persuaded that a land lay waiting for them to work, a land to which they could stake a better claim than in nearby Ireland. In this respect, the legal justification the English used to legitimize their claim to America was also used to excuse the removal of the indigenous people from the land on which they lived. The argument advanced was that these people were merely sojourners in a land over which they roamed but could claim no title by right of settlement. The usurpation began with the very naming of the land and its inhabitants: the continent was called North America, after an Italian who never visited there; the English lands, Virginia, after a queen who did not invest in them, and the people, Indians, after a race who lived half a world away. Of these it was the name, Virginia, that was to do the most damage, for it hinted broadly that the land was unoccupied, untamed, unowned and ripe for possession, when, in fact, the inhabitants themselves referred to the eastern littoral as Tsenacommacah, which means ‘densely inhabited land’. So it was until, in the north, European diseases, the harbingers of settlement, widowed the world on which the Puritans would step ashore.
By using the term Virginia, Ralegh implied that the land was still ‘as God made it’ but not that, unlike his Queen, it should not be penetrated. If this sounds too coarse then we have his views on his other new world, Guiana, to support this interpretation; for of that land, he wrote:
Guiana is a country that hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought; the face of the earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil spent by manurance, the graves have not been opened for gold, the mines not broken with sledges nor the images pulled down out of their temples. It hath never been entered by any army of strength, and never conquered by any Christian prince.
One impression that did hold sway, for a while, was the view that the ‘naturals’ would warmly welcome the settlers. Arthur Barlowe, having had his feet and clothes washed by attentive Amerindian maidens, considered his reconnaissance party to have been ‘entertained with all love and kindness’ by a people who were ‘most gentle, loving and faithful, void of all guile, and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the golden age’. Fatefully for them this included the, incorrect, observation that, like the lilies of the field, they toiled not, for ‘the earth bringeth forth all things in abundance, as in the first creation, without toil or labour’. Such a naive comment, based on inadequate research, was to support the idea that the land was indeed ‘virgin’ and thus vacuum domicilium, that is, it was legally waste because the Amerindians had not ‘subdued’ it in a way that was recognized by European law. In fact, all along the coast the population fed itself mainly through the clever symbiotic husbandry of Indian corn (maize), beans and squashes, to which hunting provided merely a supplement. Far from being savage they were, in fact, incredibly well adapted to their sauvage, the country.
For most of those who intended to settle in America, arguments over the morality of land ownership were irrelevant; what they wanted was sufficient land granted to them on which they could raise both a family and a profit. If this was not going to be given, then the terms of tenure needed also to be tempting. This was the great argument that the Mayflower voyagers waged with their sponsors and which they would, through the advantage of distance, eventually win.
Each potential colony had its band of propagandists. Thus William Vaughan, a Welsh landowner from Carmarthenshire, wrote a rambling work, The Golden Grove, which encouraged the colonization of Newfoundland as a cure for overcrowding and which, combined with fishing ‘Neptune’s sheep’, would restore the nation to economic prosperity. Newfoundland, for the occupation of which letters patent were signed on 2 May 1610, marked the first real attempt to excite interest in a land, as it was, as opposed to how it was envisioned. John Guy, the first Governor, less open to self-deception than either Ralegh or the Virginia Company, reported on what he saw; ten years later so did John Mason in his A Brief Discourse of the New-Found-Land . . . Inciting our Nation to Go Forward in that Hope-Full Plantation Begunne, in which, after admitting that the country had neither the fertility nor the pleasing climate of Virginia, he proposed the following reasons why Newfoundland might be preferred to Virginia:
1. The nearness to Britain, ‘being but half of the way to Virginia, having a convenient passage’, which made for both a short outward and a shorter return journey.
2. The great and valuable fishing trade that existed and supported thousands of English families.
3. The availability and thus the cheapness of passage for both settlers and stores.
4. The ‘security from foreign and domestic enemies’ because of the scarcity of ‘savages’ by whom ‘the planters as yet never suffered damage’.
In 1620, Richard Whitbourne, a seasoned and pioneer traveller to Newfoundland who had been present when Humphrey Gilbert laid claim to the islands, published, to popular acclaim, his Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland with Many Reasons to Prove How Worthy and Beneficial a Plantation May There Be Made . . ., which ran to three editions between 1620 and 1623. His key suggestion was the need to establish a beneficial link between fishing and settlement which would provide, unlike the more southern settlements, a quick profitable return. What is more, settlements would create a demand for goods which the fishing fleet could deliver, thus giving them an income on their outward voyage as well as facilitating their drying and loading of fish for the return journey, which might be to southern Europe, to exchange fish, much in demand, for goods for sale in England. Moreover, Whitbourne saw Newfoundland as being a link to a line of settlements that would stretch down the coast of the continent.
Whitbourne’s work was designed to influence Lord Falkland’s decision
